Mr. Michael Walsh:

In one form or another, most items have been addressed. The regional coherence issue is one. The technological university can be a significant platform for building that. Equally, it is about concentrating on the matters from which there are outputs and results. Tourism and the agri-sector, as Mr. Crockett stated, are two areas, along with the technological university, that can give us a real focus at a regional level and start to deliver that coherence which, perhaps, has not been here heretofore.

I agree with Ms Widger in the context of an IDA Ireland regional director. Certainly, at a perception level, the relationship between performance in the FDI area and the non-presence of an IDA Ireland director is strongly reinforced across the south east region.

There is continuing dialogue with the airlines. There is an issue in the context of the existing runway length. A very moderate investment will significantly increase the potential operators there. Certainly, there are operators interested. Getting that signed up is akin to the chicken and the egg. If one had the limited extension, I would be fairly satisfied one could deliver the airlines. We already have Flybe. We certainly have a viable Luton route. We are not seeking to build an international airport to compete with the likes of Dublin, Cork and Shannon but we are seeking a niche regional airport that can give direct connectivity. It is based also on tourism and building our tourism proposition overall. The simple reality, for example, on that previous Luton route was that well over 50% of the traffic was inbound in the context of tourism, targeting a relatively niche element of the London market and helping to pull through localised marketing, in other words, pulling additional tourists into Ireland Inc. rather than merely robbing it from any place else. That point needs to be made.

On the basic point about FDI in terms of the hour for the airport and otherwise, it is one of the players in the game in our experience. With many bigger players, competitiveness is their key issue. We lost a good deal of jobs in Waterford. If we are honest about it, Ireland Inc., through the Celtic tiger years, got slightly uncompetitive in many contexts and we certainly saw manifestations of that. There has been a phenomenal transition, in Waterford and right across the south-east region, in terms of living costs, wage costs and a host of areas that are bringing us significantly back into that piece. Certainly, be it the likes of Bausch + Lomb or Teva Pharmaceuticals, in terms of the skill-sets that are available, they have no difficulty in attracting staff. The reality is that much of the population in the south east developed their skills elsewhere. We are tending to lose them. The challenge is to bring them back. Once we do, one of the great stories we must tell is that we retain better than any other region. That, of course, is because of the good weather and the overall living environment.